Alone in a no-man's land

WHEN Veronica Guerin was murdered by a contract killer as she sat in her car in Clondalkin last June, Irish society was shocked but not surprised.

There was, throughout Ireland, a genuine outpouring of grief and anger that the private life of a young mother and the public life of a well known media figure had been ended with such ruthless brutality.

The wall of flowers outside the Dail, the minute's silence that was observed in work places throughout the State, the tears that flowed in thousands of homes as people watched news footage of Veronica's husband, Graham, and son, Cathal, at her funeral - all were evidence of a genuine sense of communal loss.

To this grief was added a layer of shame that Ireland was appearing before the world as the kind of unsettled, frontier society where journalists got shot and the law seemed powerless. The political system responded with changes in the law and the Constitution.

But savage as it was, Guerin's murder, presumably on the orders of the drug dealers whose crimes she had been investigating for The Sunday Independent, was not entirely unexpected. In itself, it was a predictable occurrence. And in what it told us about Irish society, it merely underlined what we already knew - that whatever innocence there had ever been was long since lost.

Guerin had shown, in the months before her death, heroic courage. But her death itself brought to mind Berthold Brecht's dictum: "Unhappy the land that needs heroes".

When her killer fired five shots into her body, it was the third gun attack on Veronica Guerin in 18 months, each one more vicious. Death threats had been followed by the firing of shots through the window of her house. When this didn't stop her, a gunman was sent to shoot her in the leg.

Shortly after she had recovered from this shooting, she was badly beaten up by a criminal, who subsequently threatened to kill herself and her husband and to sexually - abuse her son. Even without the 20/20 vision of hindsight, is was obvious that she was in grave and immediate danger.

That fact, in itself, added an extra dimension of sorrow to her loss. In September, her brother, Jimmy Guerin, wrote to The Irish Times, expressing the view that "no story is worth the life of a reporter".

He argued that the burden of risk that his sister bore should never have been carried by an individual reporter. "Veronica," he wrote, "was in great danger for close on two years, and I believe that steps could have been taken to prevent her death.

"For instance, if a team, as opposed to an individual, was assigned to such dangerous work, then you would have to kill an entire team to stop a story, and I don't believe that even the amoral people who gunned down Veronica would be capable of this task."

THE problem for Guerin's newspaper, The Sunday Independent, though, was that her by line - sold papers. She had become a celebrity in her own right. She featured heavily in their advertising campaigns, especially after the firstshooting. Her very success had created a logic in which it was easier to up the ante by confronting alleged criminals more and more directly than to switch to a more lowkey, collective approach to the same stories.

Once the Independent decided to strip away the cloak of anonymity which made criminals like The Boxer, The Penguin and the Coach into cartoon figures, and to name names, a lone reporter was left face to face with some very dangerous men.

But the reading public enjoyed the drama. The brave young woman tracking down and confronting the bad guys had the air of a movie thriller. There was a vicarious thrill in being brought at a safe distance into the sordid and vicious world of violent and ruthless gangsters. That the movie might end in the appalling death of an immensely talented reporter and a greatly loved wife and mother was not supposed to be part of the script.

The strange thing was that Guerin was merely telling her readers what they should already have known. Organised crime has been an insidious but obvious presence in Irish life for at least two decades. Addiction to heroin - the source of much of the wealth held by the criminals she exposed - has been at epidemic levels in Dublin since the early 1980s. Only because of a wilful ignorance masquerading as innocence did Guerin have to go to such dangerous lengths to expose the obvious.

That work involved a kind of unwritten pact with the criminals themselves, one in which the gangsters imagined they were using the journalist and she thought she was using them. In the intensely moving interview which he gave to RTE's Sean O'Rourke shortly after she was killed, her husband, Graham Turley, acknowledged that her relationship with criminal sources was often one of trust and respect.

He said she would sometimes talk of a criminal contact as "an absolute genius in this field. She would be writing a story about the evil deed they had done and still have this devotion and loyalty to that person as well".

VERONICA herself was, paradoxically, trapped not only by those entanglements but also by the very danger she was in. The very public nature of the threats on her life made it difficult for her to step back without seeming to give a symbolic victory to some of the nastiest elements in Irish society. It is clear that she continued, not out mindless or reckless courage, but out of a feeling that she had no choice.

In an interview she gave to an American television station shortly before her death, she gave an insight into her impossible dilemma.

"Before I ever got into investigating the crime underworld in Dublin," she said, "if I said `Okay, over the next 12, 18, 24 months, you're going to have shots fired into your house, be shot yourself, and be severely assaulted, and your family are going to be threatened and intimidated', am I going to get into it? No, I would never have got into it. But having got into it, I can't walk away from it because it's a job that must be done, and I'm a journalist."

She should never have been in that situation. Editors and readers should not have been caught up in the drama of a lone woman against the underworld.

Irish society should not have needed the evidence of her reports from the frontline before it could believe in the existence of organised crime, when the evidence of the work of drug dealers and gangsters could be seen openly on the city streets.

The Government should not have needed a savage murder to convince it that the way to get at wealthy criminals was by seizing their assets.

The criminal bosses should have been too worried about the Garda, the customs and the tax authorities to concern themselves with one reporter working on her own.

But between what should have been and what was stretched a no man's land in which Veronica Guerin was caught alone and in the open, with nowhere to take cover.